Wednesday, August 25, 2010

An Ignorance of Evil

"How do you know God is real unless you experiment with other things first?"

Is it possible that you could ever truly develop a strong and living faith in God without first messing up your life? Could someone actually live a decent life, grow to understand the truths of the Bible and then give themselves to serving God wholeheartedly for the rest of their lives without going through some horrible rock-bottom experience? Does the absence of suffering make them fake Christians?

When my husband was young, he told himself that he believed in God, the Bible and all that stuff, but drugs and alcohol and the friends that came with them were a necessity to really enjoy life. He made a deal with himself that later in life he'd serve God, but in high school, fun was the priority. Now he wishes that he had known how real and powerful God is, back then. He would have saved himself a lot of pain, because in fact none of that stuff was fun, it was just a way to deal with the unhappiness that only disappeared once he surrendered his life to God.

Why is it that the idea of serving God is synonymous with deprivation and no fun whatsoever? It's a lie that people who grow up in the church fall for every single generation. (One reason why too many churches are desperate to look "cool" as if they have to compete with evil... see exhibit #1 above.)

People - generally young people - see some hypocrisy in church and use that as an excuse to reject God. They feel restrained by their parents, and so` determine to do whatever they feel like once the restraints are gone, but have no desire to understand the wisdom behind those restraints in the first place. Evil looks so very cool, and their parents life... something for old people. So they throw themselves into the stupidity of rejecting God, thinking that they "had to do it to find themselves...." They may think that they never stopped believing in God, but the moment they stopped obeying Him, they rejected Him.

Unfortunately, many of them never do find themselves. They get lost in the confusion that they created for themselves. People who never knew God but live horrible lives can reach rock bottom because deep inside they have a longing for something better - a knowledge that this can't be all there is to life. But those who already know something better but choose to jump into the pit, rarely hit the bottom. Their willful rejection of the truth has made their personally designed pit, a bottomless one. And all they can do is fall, or in a moment of sanity grab a hold of the slippery walls and try their best to climb out - a long and messy process that requires much more self-examination and effort to be free than for those who never knew God in the first place.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, "There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young; there is a darker ignorance that comes from doing it, as men by sleeping lose the knowledge of sleep."

Who's smarter, the one who believes he has to hit rock bottom, or the one who chooses to stay out of the pit in the first place? Sad to say, the answer is not obvious to most.

This article is an eye-opener. I can very much relate to it because I grew up in a Christian church and raised up in a Christian way....so I know what it feels to be curious sometimes of how to live like others. This curiosity comes from a false justification of my own weaknesses. As I am made aware of it, I die to myself daily so as not to fall into the pit of my own self-knowledge.

Dear Mrs.Evelyn,This is a strong message,and makes me think about my life,about my past,I grew in the church and i was not intelligent to choose not to pass by the bottom of the well,I left that my weakness was speaking loudly than the GOD S voice in my life.When I look at my past I feel rage of having been so foolish, of how much time I lost looking for a passing joy while God was me offering the eternal joy, today I do not exchange my life with God for anything, and ask God to be in use to help to young persons who are like one day I was, it is a stupidity to think that it is necessary to reach the well to know God, when the privilege has been to know it from boy we should never have released it. I learnt this lesson duramente.In Faith=)

Great message Mrs. Evelyn! You know at times I used to think that people have to really suffer in order to really find God. But it's not true at all! the person just has to be smart actually not even just think, use our brain to choose to let God in now rather than 'wait until they're older' it's just suffering even more!

Mrs. Evelyn,Many people think that they should go through all the pain in life first but the question is how will you get out of it? If you know there was a better choice from the beginning then why go the other way. God is the right choice so just choose Him now and really live life.

Wow. Yes, we see it all the time. I saw it in my own life and like you said the path to getting back up was slippery and messy. It has made me the person I am today but I don’t – by any means – recommend that path.

These is something that I see in the youth nowadays. It seems that they haven't suffered enought to give their life to God. I don't want them to have to hit rock bottom to change - I want them to change without experimenting the things of the world. It really makes me angry that they don't think this way. :[

I just have to keep on praying that they open their eyes soon before its too late.

What you wrote is true. Many think (and even myself I used to think) one can only know God through suffering. Once we have lived our lives and suffered, can we then truly serve God. This is wrong and the trap of the Devil. That's why many young people say, "I will go to church when I am old. let me enjoy my youth now!. Smart is he who clings on to his faith in God and avoids going down the path of destruction.

There is a few people in the world who actually lived a decent life and grew up to serving God.There were times in my life that I wished I knew who God was from the beggining before I hit rock bottom.I can say I am an example of a person who was born in a church and left to do my own thing like I didn't know what I was doing was wrong.It so hard to regain that relationship with God once you leave him for the first time.And it was a lesson for me when I hit rock bottom to see that I was going the way.